Nazarene Theological Semlnary

NAZARENE THEOLOGICAL SEMLNARY

PRACTICES OF CORPORATE LAMENT FOR THE LOCAL PARISH: A RESOURCE FOR PASTORS

A Project Submitted to the Seminary Faculty In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF MINISTRY

John Williams Nielson

Kansas City, Missouri February 20, 2013

PRACTICES OF CORPORATE LAMENT FOR THE LOCAL PARISH: A RESOURCE FOR PASTORS

All rights reserved. Nazarene Theological Seminary has permission to reproduce and distribute this document in any form by any means for purposes chosen by the Seminary, including, without limitation, preservation or instruction.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Introduction ...... 4

Chapter Two: Literature Review...... 22

Building a Foundation for Our Understanding of Lament

Biblical Foundations Literature

Theological Foundations Literature

Psycho-Social Foundations Literature

Liturgical Foundations Literature

Literature Summary and Implications

Chapter Three: Research Design ...... 75

Overview The Setting The Goals

The Survey of Pastors The Presentation to Pastors Presentation to Laity Online Discussion Group

Chapter Four: Research Data and Results...... 88

Introduction The Presentation The Survey

The Continuing Discussion

Chapter Five: Summary and Conclusions...... 96

Appendices...... 114

Bibliography...... 166

Chapter One, Introduction How Long O Lord?: The Lost Language of Lament

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, "I have prevailed; " my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Psalm 13 (New Revised Standard Version)

INTRODUCTION

Sometime in the early hours of Friday, December 14, 2012, Adam shot and killed his mother, Nancy. He grabbed three weapons and headed to the elementary school where she served as a teacher. With 700 students in attendance, sometime around 9:30 AM, Adam shot his way into the school. Over the next horrifying moments he shot and killed twenty children, ages six and seven. With the addition of six teachers, Adam Lanza killed twenty-six innocent people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This horrific event impacted not only this small community in New England, but gripped a whole nation as well. This tragedy, which occurred during the time frame of this project, serves as a critical example for us all, bringing to life unimaginable pain, sorrow and suffering.

The event at Sandy Hook is but one example of calamities that impact our collective experience is such dramatic and distressing ways. Memories of these events are

awakened with a simple word or phrase, often simply a location: 9/11, Katrina, Columbine, tsunami, Sandy, Aurora, Joplin, to name but a few. How do we respond to these types of tragedies? How do we process the whole range of calamities and challenges that life brings to us? What is our response as human beings? What is our response as Christians? How does the community of faith respond in moments such as these? How do we truly "weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15)? What do we do when there is nothing that can be done? While there may be a variety of responses to these questions, there is one that is biblical, significant, and often missing, especially in the life of the local parish. That response is lament.

In the worship life of the Church, there is a need to rediscover the role of lament, particularly corporate lament. Lament, at its basic definition is to express grief for or about, to mourn (to lament a death) or regret deeply; to deplore (He lamented his thoughtless acts.); to grieve audibly, to wail, to express sorrow or regret. It can mean a feeling or an expression of grief; a lamentation, a song or poem expressing deep grief or mourning. The lament expressed in Scripture, that is needed in the Church, and is the basis of this study, includes these definitions, however, as will become clear, additional elements must also be incorporated into a biblical-theological praxis of lament.

Those in pastoral ministry are keenly aware of many great needs present in their congregations. It would seem that trials and tribulations are reaching record levels. The extent of brokenness and dysfunction staggers the mind. We encounter evil at younger ages and confront it at deeper levels. Anxiety and dread due to the state of our economy, death and disease, violence in our communities, our nation, and in our world; all of these are sometimes more than people can endure. While the existence of these issues is not

uncommon, it does seem that the breadth and depth of them is at a new reality. It is also true that as clergy seek to provide pastoral care for their people, they can easily become overwhelmed by the expanse and frequency of the pain and sorrow that so often impact their people.

What is the response of the people of God in these circumstances? Traditionally, it has

involved prayer: prayer requests, pastoral prayer, family prayer time, etc. Certainly

pastors use the pulpit to bring God's Word to God's people who face such overwhelming

need in their lives. This reality is also demonstrated by an increased need for pastoral care

and counseling. While all of these are important and good, there is still the need to

rediscover the biblical art of lament.

Lament indispensably shapes prayer, proclamation, ministry, and witness for such times. ... It is our shared conviction that lament, particularly biblical lament, provides the church with a rhetoric for prayer and reflection that befits these volatile times, a rhetoric that mourns loss, examines complicity in evil, cries for divine help, and sings and prays with hope. For indeed, what ultimately shapes biblical lament is not the need of the creature to cry its woe, but the faithfulness of the God who hears and acts.1

Sally Brown and Patrick Miller, Lament (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), xix.

Pursuing the topic of lament, and the need for lament to be recovered as a lost language and practice, takes place preferably in the context of the local parish, and, as such, is dependent upon the role of the pastor to be able to lead such a recovery. Leadership in this area is based upon the priestly and prophetic functions on the pastoral office and assumes the significance of doxological leadership as a vital means of teaching and of pastoral care. This brings up several questions: What does it mean to be a priestly pastor-shepherd in this day and time? What does it look like to be an authentic

worshiping community of faith? What are the missing ingredients for such a community? What key challenges or issues need to be addressed if we are to become the faith community to which God is calling us?

To set a context for this discussion, we begin by addressing the concept of

■y

doxological or sacramental, leadership. Across the last two decades the Church has witnessed numerous leadership models come into popularity. These include a CEO model, a Maxwellian leadership model, a Church growth model, a Church health model, and a Missional Leader model, with a host of variations on them all. Certainly, there are important lessons we can learn from each of these, and many of those principles should still be incorporated into our operation and praxis.

There have also been many changes and developments throughout this time in the area of worship. These include the oft discussed "worship wars," but, fundamentally, there has been a renewed focus to the overall area of worship. While many positive developments have resulted from this emphasis, an intentional integration of the theology and practice of worship within the role of pastoral leadership is essential. In many evangelical traditions, including the Church of the Nazarene there is a fundamental need to rediscover the priestly role of the pastor. Often the term sacramental leadership simply refers to leading corporate worship rather than intentionally leading the congregation toward a desired future, teaching people about personal spiritual formation, shaping their hearts and lives to impact the church and local community through the sacramental life of the people of God.

This term is used to refer to leading and teaching God's people through the worshiping life of the people of God, that through services of worship that include word and sacrament, the pastor can help shape the spiritual lives of her or his congregation and provide pastoral care and spiritual formation.

It is certainly not a new issue or one that has not been significantly explored. In

William Willimon's important book, Worship as Pastoral Care, the author explores how corporate worship is the environment in which pastoral care can and must take place, and it is a defining role for the pastor. This book was Willimon's "own effort to better integrate the role of priest and pastor and to see some of the many ways in which worship and pastoral care can inform, challenge, enrich, and support each other."3 While this book provided important groundwork, it primarily focused on four specific services (the funeral, the wedding, baptism, and the Lord's Supper). In our tradition, there has been little emphasis beyond these specific services in the life of the congregation. While there have been discussions in connection with the various elements of worship, there is insufficient discussion of how all this could come together as an integrated whole. It is important to explore how these worship elements can be incorporated into the broader task of pastoral care.

What then is the place of lament within this framework of doxological leadership? We understand the place of lament from our study of the Psalms and we may have even 3 William H. Willimon, Worship As Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979), 12

While there have been examples of more formal, liturgical congregations or services in our tradition in recent years, these are the exceptions, usually centered around our educational institutions. Only limited discussion, training, and resourcing exists for congregations whose contexts and cultures would not necessarily move fully in the direction of a formalized, liturgical worship. Whatever the setting, style, or context of worship, there is great value in understanding the ways that worship, sacrament, and liturgy ean be a vehicle of pastoral leadership. In all of these settings, the need to provide opportunities for corporate lament exists.

preached about it, but do we actually practice lament to any great extent in our settings of corporate worship? Do we give active permission for our people to lament and offer opportunities for lament to take place? Practices of corporate lament need to develop as a part of the doxological leadership of the pastor. And, with the understanding that through our worship practices, we are able to engage in pastoral care and spiritual formation, we may better serve and minister to the people in our churches.

Having set the context of this project at the core of the worship and preaching ministry of the pastor, and given the opportunity to provide care and growth through these means, we should further explore the specific place of lament as an important aspect of pastoral leadership. For this to be accomplished, we must further examine the specific nature of biblical lament.

Lament is a common language of the Bible. While some of the specifics of how lament is present throughout Scripture will be addressed in the next chapter, it is clear that lament is a regular pattern expressed in the Bible. Though present throughout the narrative of Scripture, ironically it still remains a virtual foreign language in the lives of many Christians.

The reality that lament is a language that lacks fluency among many, if not most believers seems strange when we realize how central lament is to the Psalter and how often Christians point to the Book of Psalms as a favorite or significant source of comfort in their lives. It seems that disconnect exists between profession and practice, between claim and conviction. Perhaps the most critical need is to rediscover ways to incorporate the pattern and practice of the psalmist into our own lives. It is important for the psalms to become more than just inspirational writings, but a model for how to navigate our own

times of loss, pain, and sorrow. They must come to be more than prayers we read, but prayers we pray. More than that, they must serve as a model for us to follow. It is what Michael Jinkins refers to in his book, In the House of the Lord: Inhabiting the Psalms of Lament, as the need to

[connect] the psalms of lament with those in our contemporary communities who lament so that our voices may be joined to the voices of those who for centuries have cried unto the Lord, and have received assurance that they were heard by the God who shares their suffering and desires for them better things than they can hope or imagine. We discover in these lamentations the remarkable sanity of the psalms, the awareness that God forms and transforms us through the crucible of suffering, that evil and pain will not have the last word, and that God ultimately turns all things to God's own redemptive purposes. The valley of the shadow of death is not our final destination but it is necessary to walk this way if we are to dwell in the house of the Lord.4

This ability to authentically live out the example of Scripture begins with the patterns

established in liturgy. It is in the worshiping life of the church that we first begin to

practice living out the claims of Scripture. "Liturgy as much as any other dimension of

the church's life, writes the 'lived theology' of the Christian community - that is the

theological vision that most believers live by."5

The challenge is before us. How do we provide a theological praxis for corporate

lament? It begins by acknowledging the sorrow and suffering around us. Too often, we

limit this awareness to times of prayer, usually in the form of prayer requests. We are

more comfortable with praise and thanksgiving and with keeping things "positive." We

Michael Jinkins, In the House of the Lord: Inhabiting the Psalms of Lament (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 119-120.

5 John D. Witvliet, Worship Seeking Understanding: Windows Into Christian Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 17.

have a propensity to move our sorrows to the margin and, in so doing, we communicate

much more than we realize about the nature of God, shared life, and Christian community.

Our objective must go beyond mere acknowledgement. To give full expression to lament, we must find ways to give people permission to lament; to say that there is a place and a way to "lift up your sorrow and offer your pain."[1] To do so can be an act of worship, an offering/sacrifice and an act of trust and praise. We must give opportunities to embrace redemptive suffering (another key concept worthy of exploration) as a way to identify with Christ. In the words of the Apostle Paul, it is to "want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead" (Philippians 3:10-11).[2] We need to allow people to experience and explore the depth of lament in their own journey of faith.

Furthermore, we must find ways to incorporate communal lament into the regular worship practices of the Church. With so few resources available, this is an area of need for the Church to explore. In lieu of such resources, creative care should be used to develop context-specific ways to incorporate lament into the worship life of the church. We must provide opportunities to discover how to express the cries that are "out of the depths" (Psalm 130:1).

The need for theological and pastoral praxis of corporate lament is, admittedly, a broad and complex topic. Nevertheless, it is apparent that such a pursuit can have tremendous impact on the character of the local community of faith, and particularly, our

worship and sacramental experience. This is another factor that must be acknowledged -the corporate expression of lament has significant implications for the formation of relationships within the context of the church as the Body of Christ. Lament helps to provide the honesty that is required for authentic Christian community. This points again to the central need to incorporate language, opportunities and permission to lament in settings of corporate worship. Failure to do so violates the relationships in the community of faith: